The thrills continued when my uncle tried to ski down the southern face of this active volcano. Back then, Lassen Peak was mostly covered in snow through midsummer, so a diehard skiing down its face in July was hardly notable. But doing so by moonlight was—and remains—half-baked, pun emphatically intended.

Nowadays, the peak’s snowpack succumbs to the summer sun much sooner, and thus is more suitable for an e-bike daredevil with a death wish. The Lassen Ski Area resort, where my professional ski bum uncle originally took up the sport, had closed in 1993, in part because of poor snowfall.

In retrospect, the fate of Lassen Ski Area was a preview of California’s, and the world’s, impending environmental and economic reckoning. Some adaptations will be successful and even beneficial, such as the Lake Tahoe region’s ski resorts pivoting to summer recreation. Other adaptations will leave scars and trauma. Ultimately, many climate change adaptations come down to math and tradeoffs. In that framework, we need to think harder—across the state—about the snow and water we have left.

Water is life, the saying goes, but snow is prosperity. California’s annual agricultural output is approximately $50 billion, or just 2 percent of the state’s GDP. Yet the state’s agricultural industry uses 80 percent of its annual water supply. Our agricultural brethren have fed a lot of people with crops grown with that water. But this whole venture presumes water supply stability courtesy of the Cascade-Sierra snowpack.

But for how much longer? Our warmer and drier climate is reducing the snowpack’s historically ample “excess” water that trickles down to streams, lakes, and rivers each summer. Record low reservoir levels threaten to idle hydro-electric dams like Lake Oroville, and may contribute to rolling blackouts this summer. State and federal water managers have significantly cut water allocations to agriculture. We’ve just emerged from the severe drought of 2011 to 2017 into a new one with inequitable human, environmental, and economic costs we won’t know for years.

Statewide policy and political actors are clinging to solutions aimed at fortifying the status quo, primarily the continued Frankensteining of the desert on the south and west sides of the Central Valley into an agricultural behemoth. The status quo also includes the perpetual expansion of the insatiably thirsty Southern California mega-region and big water conveyance infrastructure projects like Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Delta tunnel.

There are some new ideas. Researchers from UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz are more imaginative in a study suggesting that all 4,000 miles of canals be covered with solar panels—reducing evaporation and producing clean energy! But so far absent from the water discourse is a policy considered best practice for confronting another climate change villain, sea-level rise.

That policy is managed retreat.

On the coast, managed retreat means abandoning housing and development to the sea. But more broadly, managed retreat is a risk management approach for evaluating land use of environmentally sensitive or at-risk property and infrastructure. It’s the simple and prudent acknowledgement that we can’t rebuild and replace everything mother nature reclaims, but we can repurpose the land for other, positive uses.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency projects sea-level rise of 3 to 5 feet by 2060, and 7 to 9 feet by 2100. For every foot of sea-level rise, the ocean moves inland by 300 feet. Think of your favorite beach and how far it is from the water to the closest street or home. Now from the water imagine one football field inland. Anything inside that football field will be underwater from just 1 foot of sea-level rise.

Managed retreat isn’t popular with everyone, especially those with vulnerable beachside property. But once storm surge after storm surge makes you uninsurable and FEMA declines reimbursement for rebuilding in the new high-tide zone, you’re taking the full loss. A managed retreat approach actively and collaboratively migrates communities out of harm’s way before catastrophe strikes. It’s easier to move on a sunny day than in waist-high tides. Living examples of successful managed retreat are the cities of Pacifica and Marina, in San Mateo and Monterey Counties, respectively.

Managed retreat also needs to be on the table for the San Joaquin Valley, where the water situation ceased being sustainable some time ago. A number of local communities lack safe drinking water, and pumped-in groundwater is causing the land itself to sink, in some places up to 28 feet.

Managed retreat would make more sense than anything we’re doing now. We must start encouraging and incentivizing people and farms in drought-stricken regions dependent on water transfers to migrate somewhere more hospitable to agriculture and other forms of human development.

Here’s the key question our leaders are running away from: How much more profit-driven stress can the state’s water supply be subjected to before the ecologies of whole regions—the California Delta, the Sacramento Valley—collapse? There’s only one right answer to that question: We don’t want to find out.

If we stop diverting so much water to agriculture, especially in the hot and drier southern parts of the San Joaquin Valley, then the Sacramento Valley and the Delta stand a better chance of enduring through climate change. This doesn’t mean the end of agriculture. Rather, the goal is to preemptively and collaboratively adapt this thirsty industry by downsizing it to match a diminished water supply.

Migrating agriculture north to the Sacramento Valley can’t be a one-to-one trade where every venture survives. The Sacramento Valley is approximately one-half the size of the San Joaquin Valley, and at most, 15 to 20 percent of the land could host relocated agriculture. The majority of San Joaquin agricultural businesses won’t survive in their current form—but some could find new life by converting their fallowed fields into solar farms to help the state achieve its goal of fossil fuel-free electricity by 2045. Or we can allow the San Joaquin Valley to revert to the desert it was before our forefathers planted a garden in it.

Our leading export crops, almonds and pistachios, are the most obvious candidates for downsizing, along with cattle ranching and the thirsty alfalfa grown for cattle feed. To ensure new water-hogging almond orchards aren’t planted in the North Valley, the state can incentivize a transition to low water usage crops.

None of this is easy—it requires our elected leaders to find new wisdom, wean themselves from big agriculture campaign donations and influence, and make holistic and geographic decisions for the state’s long-term health. But things will get even harder if we wait until nature gives us no more choices.

We don’t want California to end up like Lassen Ski Area, defunct because it no longer had the snow upon which it relied.

Which brings me back to my uncle’s harebrained moonlit ski. He lost his balance after 20 feet and slid down the peak on his side and back. He volcano body-surfed, and walked away with nothing but a minor scratch on his forearm.

I still can feel the beating summit wind, and I recall thinking that, viewed from above, fireworks resembled jellyfish. Today, I think about how that vista may not last forever. The state is so dry and fire-prone, that we don’t have long before Fourth of July fireworks, like that Lassen snow, are things of the past.

The post To Beat Climate Change, Rural Towns and Farms Need to Head North appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rural food banks, like the one I work at, have an outsized importance, because there are fewer food options in smaller places. And while we are far from big cities like Los Angeles, where I lived until moving up here 12 years ago, we are in the middle of the pandemic’s challenges around poverty and health. So many people here in Kings County are in need of food in these times—including, ironically, farmworkers and others whose jobs involve food.

Our food bank is tiny—with just 2.5 employees (including myself). With a yearly budget that hovers around $150,000 for food, we are dependent on community support, donations, and volunteers to do three to four distributions a week. The pandemic has brought us more resources and more food—but also so many more people to feed.

Our food bank is just one small piece of Kings Community Action Organization, the non-profit organization that is also the federally designated anti-poverty agency for Kings County (population 152,000). KCAO’s main office is in Hanford, the county seat, but the food bank operations are in Lemoore.

Before COVID, most people would just walk up to our partner sites throughout the county, but now everything we do is drive-through. We’ve added more hours to our distribution, given out food at later hours, and also added some distribution on Saturdays.

As the pandemic deepens, our volunteers have noticed more families showing, many of them in nicer trucks and SUVS than we’re used to seeing. More people tell us that they had never expected to need the food bank, until they do. We’re seeing more emotion, as people cry in gratitude.

We’ve watched the need grow quickly among farmworkers, in particular, so much so that we have begun doing special food distributions just for them, where they live. One distribution even took us out to the fields—providing food where the food is literally grown. We bring much more than food when we do a distribution—we’re delivering PPE, hand sanitizer, and, more recently, some holiday tchotchkes and information about COVID vaccines.

I’ve been working at this food bank for the last four years, and fundraising is a constant part of the job. I have noticed that the past year has been good for grant writing, with new funding from the United Way, Bank of America, Southern California Edison, and from local community members. But most of the time, money is harder for rural banks; we don’t get the financial support that food banks in big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles get from big companies, because there aren’t big companies here to sponsor you or your fundraising event. In more rural parts of the state, the bigger regional food banks receive more donations.

Our food bank, like many rural food banks, relies heavily on food provided through a federal program known as TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program) that supplements the diets of Americans with lower incomes through low-cost food. USDA provides food and administrative funds to states to operate the program and make deliveries to food banks like ours. We’re always careful to keep an inventory of two or three months of food, just in case there’s ever an interruption in the supply.

The demand in the pandemic has been intense—for every kind of food. We just had two distributions in one day—the first in Stratford and the other in Kettleman City where we provided not just food but water, because those communities have issues with water quality. We were averaging 55 families in those communities previously, but we had 200 families for these distributions.

With so much closed during COVID, we have a little more work to do in terms of finding locations for distribution that are actually open, but churches and community centers generously offer their space and parking lots. As the pandemic continues, we’ve also found that many people who used to deliver food to their own relatives no longer can, because someone has COVID or is isolating at home, Fortunately, Kings Cares Essential Workforce Support Program assists currently COVID-positive families. (There is comprehensive support to help essential workers isolate or quarantine safely, at home or in a hotel; healthy food, cleaning supplies, toiletries, transportation and laundry service, and utilities/housing assistance are all available.)

While this time is challenging, I worry it may be even harder for rural food banks when the pandemic is over. While the need for food could remain extra high, I fear that food donations and financial support may not be enough to keep up.

So don’t forget about us.

You can help us even if you don’t live nearby—by calling your legislative office to remind them how important food banks are in places where there are fewer food options. We also welcome donations from anywhere. And if you’re up for a trip, let us know. We can always use volunteers.

The post Rural Food Banks Have Never Been More Important appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But will she stay? It’s no idyll. The housing she was promised is in disrepair, and the old town doctor feels threatened by her presence. And while sparks fly with the hunky Marine veteran who owns the only local bar, Mel finds that she can’t escape the loneliness, drugs, violence, economic struggle, and health care problems of L.A. All those same problems are present in rural California, too.

Don’t bother looking for Virgin River on any map. The town is the literary invention of the romance novelist Robyn Carr, who has made it the fictional setting for 20 novels that have sold more than 13 million copies since 2007. A 21st book arrives this fall.

I’m not the intended customer of the romance genre, but early in the COVID-19 lockdown, I started watching the recent Netflix adaptation of Virgin River. Despite the predictable plots and plodding dialogue, I couldn’t stop watching—Virgin River offers an intriguingly unconventional portrayal of a part of California that few Californians have seen with their own eyes. I find myself thinking even more about the show now, as the uprising against police violence spreads quickly from cities to rural settlements the size of Virgin River.

While the geography of Carr’s novels and the Netflix series are vague, Virgin River appears to be in a remote county which has no incorporated municipalities and sits among the rivers, trees, and mountains between coastal Eureka and inland Redding. The place best fitting that description is Trinity County, population just 13,000, and one of only four California counties that are considered fully rural. (Definitions of “rural” vary, but the U.S. Census defines rural as anything not urban, and defines urban as any cluster of at least 2,500 people.)

In California, America’s most urbanized state, this is a fraught but important time to think about places like Trinity County and Virgin River. All too often, Golden State urbanites ignore or demonize remote communities when we should embrace them as partners in addressing our state’s most serious problems.

Today’s conventional wisdom is that the Golden State, and the whole country, really, are badly divided between two different universes: the rural and the urban. Political narratives dwell on the alleged chasm between our bluer giant urban regions and our redder lightly populated places. Those narratives both polarize us (by exaggerating conflict and emboldening white racists to claim rural victimhood) and weaken democracy (by spreading the toxic idea that the country can’t be governed because it is just too divided).

Under COVID, our media has been obsessed with the differences between how more urban and more rural counties responded to the pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newsom, under pressure from the political right for not recognizing the purportedly different realities in rural counties, abandoned his statewide shelter-in-place in favor of a localized, county-by-county approach.

Political and media stories of rural-urban divide may keep audiences engaged and riled up. But these narratives so badly exaggerate the differences between small and large California that they constitute a dangerous form of misrepresentation. To the contrary, data and experience teach us that rural and urban California are remarkably similar, particularly in the challenges they face.

And on this highly relevant point, the romance novels about Virgin River—for all their clichés—understand California far better than most Californians do.

The Virgin River novels, like the television series, are all about the union of urban and rural. In most of Carr’s books, a struggling person—usually a middle-class professional from a bigger California city—ends up in Virgin River, looking for escape or healing. Most but not all are women. Among them are a Sacramento prosecutor, who was nearly killed by a criminal; a twice-divorced LAPD officer who was shot in the line of duty; a San Francisco sous-chef whose career has collapsed; a Silicon Valley public relations warrior who got burned out; Native American rancher from the urbanizing Inland Empire.

In Virgin River, their experiences are invariably mixed. On the plus side, these Virgin River arrivals always seem to find attractive local residents with military experience—Carr started writing romance novels four decades ago as an Air Force wife—and talents for heterosexual lovemaking. On the other hand, the new arrivals all must adjust to their disappointment that Virgin River, for all its natural beauty, can be just as difficult as the urban environments they left behind.

The plots emphasize domestic violence, post-traumatic stress, environmental damage, housing access, America’s healthcare failings, and the challenges of addiction, business practices, and criminality surrounding the area’s growing marijuana industry. Virgin River is mostly white, but there is growing racial and ethnic diversity, just like in the real rural California. Considered together, Carr’s books and the Netflix series make a convincing argument that in the 21st century, we are all so connected that you can never escape yourself.

“There’s a need for positive drama,” Carr, a former California resident who now lives in Las Vegas, told Entertainment Weekly. “Not just goody-two-shoes, everything-is-beautiful kind of story, but a kind of story where people have real problems and real issues and they have to resolve them.”

Carr, who has set other novels in the Sierra foothills, the East Bay and Half Moon Bay, has said that Virgin River could be a community anywhere. And in this, her novels match the data.

Indeed, poverty rates are remarkably similar in California’s most populous and least populous places, especially when one looks at statistics that control for housing prices and cost of living. Pre-COVID, unemployment rates were nearly identical—under 5 percent in both rural and urban California. Education levels aren’t all that different either. Rural California, including Trinity County, actually has a higher rate of high school graduates than urban California, while urban California has a higher rate of college graduates.

Our constant talk of urban-rural divides has obscured the real story: the way once-remote places have become more urban. As more people are priced out of our mega-regions, they move to previously rural places, where growing populations support more urban-style development.

There is a convergence here, for good and bad. California jobs, both rural and urban, are heavily skewed to healthcare, retail, tourism, and government. Wherever I am in California, rural or urban, I hear civic leaders worry about the same stuff: decaying infrastructure, housing affordability, healthcare costs, and a lack of skilled workers.

Cities, once seen as dens of crime and disease, have become safer and healthier, while urbanizing remote places have fallen in rankings of public health and safety. And police misconduct, now dominating the news in cities, also plagues California’s small towns, many of which have seen George Floyd-inspired protests. Even Trinity County saw protests.

The mixing of urban and rural is actually quite Californian. Most of the people in counties that are considered remote, from Inyo to Humboldt, live in urban clusters. And 32 percent of California’s rural population lives in counties that are at least 91 percent urban. San Bernardino County—our largest county by area, extending from the L.A. suburbs to the Nevada and Arizona borders—is becoming more urban (as its suburbs grow denser) and more rural (as its far-flung areas lose people) at the same time.

While our winner-take-all politics exaggerates divisions, a closer look at Trinity County, which appears ruby red on political maps, shows that 49 percent of the county didn’t vote for Trump. Meanwhile, polling shows that dark blue Los Angeles County has a few million residents who support the president.

Virgin River, especially in the Netflix version (which, alas, was shot mostly in British Columbia), testifies to the lack of borders between rural and urban. Its storylines wrangle with the myths around both places. The “old country doctor” with whom L.A. nurse practitioner Mel Monroe tangles turns out to be a onetime medical hotshot from Seattle. Mel’s love interest, that outdoorsy barkeep, grew up in Sacramento and spent his military career in the Middle East.

“Small towns can be nice,” the hunk, Jack Sheridan, tells Mel while he makes coffee after she complains about the lack of Starbucks. “And they can have their own brand of drama. And danger.”

Virgin River is not so far away from the rest of California after all.

The post What the Fictional Town of Virgin River Gets Right About California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dovers Cottage was originally built in Abilene, Kansas, during a cattle boom in the late 1860s, when Abilene was the first great railhead connecting the cattle ranches of Texas to the emerging national rail network. But Abilene’s fortunes soon turned—when Ellsworth, Kansas, took its place as the new cattle boomtown.

Ellsworth rose to prominence in 1872 after it embarked on an audacious scheme to attract railroad construction and launched a whisper campaign against Abilene. In the words of one Abilene defender, the situation was “utterly unscrupulous” and “full of low cunning and despicable motives.”

A Santa Fe Train passes through Ellsworth, Kansas, 1867. Photo by Alexander Gardner. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Still, following the herd, the owner of Drovers Cottage moved his hotel, board by board, the 60 miles from Abilene to Ellsworth. The hotel would not prosper for long, though. While tens of thousands of cattle would pass through Ellsworth in 1872, three years later the town was declining just as Abilene had. Cattle trailers and railroads moved on to new towns, like Wichita and Dodge City.

The wrenching boom and bust cycles that roiled 19th-century Kansas cattle towns have much to teach us about how economic development reshapes communities, even today.

The emerging national market for cattle brought new opportunity to towns like Ellsworth, but it also tied their fates to distant economic forces beyond their control. Today, communities still rise and fall with the ebb and flow of global capitalism, as manufacturers make cities compete to host and subsidize new plants, and sports teams threaten to relocate if local leaders don’t hand over generous tax breaks.

Ellsworth’s rise and fall was dictated by the railroads. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, the nation’s rail network was only starting to push toward northern Texas—so Texas ranchers had to trail their herds northward to the nearest rail access points if they wanted to transport cattle to far-off buyers. Kansas towns at the leading edge of railroad construction vied to become hubs that could capture the majority of the cattle trade.

But any of several towns could potentially serve this function; the winners in this contest would be determined by where rail lines were built. A promoter of one town might negotiate with a railroad manager, while competing promoters in nearby towns were doing the exact same thing—with bribes in hand. Another external factor exacerbated the competition: uneven enforcement of quarantines intended to prevent transmission of the cattle disease known as “Texas Fever.” Town leaders, balking at the expense of quarantine compliance, often pushed state officials to enforce rival towns’ compliance while asking that a blind eye be turned to their own potential violations.

Thus, Ellsworth captured the cattle trade in early 1872 by attracting the Kansas Pacific Railway and pushing for tougher enforcement of cattle quarantines in Abilene. But rail lines soon reached southward to Wichita, and within a couple of years Wichita captured the trade from Ellsworth—until enforcement of quarantines in Wichita made Dodge City, far to the west, the newest Kansas cattle shipping center. Eventually, the railroads reached Texas, increased settlement in Kansas made quarantines unavoidable, and Kansas cattle towns all entered decline. So ended a frenzy in which an individual town might win in the short-term, but all towns, eventually, were set to lose.

That competition between towns sparked tension within communities as well. Ellsworth had vocal supporters of the cattle trade (merchants and the editor of the local paper) and passionate critics—especially local farmers. Cattle were hungry when they reached the area and could eat local fields bare or spread disease to local livestock.

Critics also contended that the cattle trade enriched a few merchants at the expense of the region’s long-term residents. One angry Ellsworth citizen asked, “What safeguard can be set up to protect … from the encroachments of men whose souls are wrapped up in the almighty dollar; men whose highest and only object is to increase their wealth even if it destroys the prospects of a whole community?”

Such criticism echoes today in the fight over the location of Amazon’s second headquarters.
At first, Amazon was able to get American cities to bid against each other to host the company, garnering offers of over $1 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. The company ultimately chose two locations—northern Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., and in the New York City borough of Queens. But in New York there was a backlash, as community leaders argued that an Amazon facility would benefit rich residents of the city while leaving Queens’ poor behind. In this way, by entering a community, a business can heighten pre-existing divisions and precipitate local power struggles. Amazon eventually had to pull out of the Queens deal.

Can communities embrace national markets while protecting local interests? The history of Ellsworth, Kansas, suggests that economic development contests pose challenges too big for any individual place to solve for itself.

In 1875, a night watchman in Ellsworth spotted a small light coming from the now-neglected Drovers Cottage. When he went to investigate, he discovered a fire in the hotel. The blaze was extinguished, but residents’ relief turned to outrage when they found oil-soaked mattresses in a backroom and realized it had been attempted arson. Suspicion fell on the hotel’s proprietor, who soon fled the town. It would be the most dramatic example of a general trend: merchants were leaving Ellsworth in search of fortunes elsewhere.

Ellsworth’s rise and decline unfolded over less than 10 years. It was not as dramatic—nor painful—as the 20th-century ascent and decline of places like Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana. But the scale of the business briefly centered in Ellsworth—hundreds of residents, hundreds of thousands of incoming cattle—and the speed of the tiny town’s changing fortunes offer an enduring lesson: When small communities are pitted against each other, or made subject to distant markets, only larger government entities—state or federal—can limit ruinous competition.

The post What 19th-Century Kansas Cow Towns Teach Us About Global Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.